Communication networks, in particular fiber optics networks, are subject to a wide variety of failures caused by natural disasters, wear out, patch-cable cuts and so on. Such failures may affect network functionalities such as data transmission and reception. To circumvent these drawbacks, most fiber optics networks use channel protection schemes for its optical layer. As soon as a failure in the network is detected, these channel protection schemes may divert the affected traffic to another fault-free path in the network. For example, under a fault-free condition, the traffic is transported along a working path. However, if a failure is detected on that path, the channel protection scheme may switch the traffic to a protecting path that was not affected by the failure.
Current protection schemes at optical layers are similar to protection schemes at digital layers. Specifically, both working and protecting paths are simultaneously monitored for failure, and in case of a network failure, an Automatic Protection Switching (APS) selects a healthier channel from which to source traffic. Although current protection schemes may satisfy sub-50 millisecond requirements for traffic recovery, they are costly to implement. Thus, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that provides sub-50 millisecond traffic recovery without costly implementation using fast digital faults triggers in conjunction with other supporting optical fault conditions.